In this edition of The Out Door, we discuss the impossibility of improvisation with Polish composer Zbigniew Karkowski, hike into the varied sonic fields of Maine-based sound-manipulator Jason Lescalleet, and assess Black Metal as depicted in the new book Beyond the Darkness. But first, we explore how long-form music uses time as an instrument.

I: Double Time

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__ The Dead C. circa early 90s

Recently, my friend Paul Haney wrote on Facebook about Siltbreeze's new reissue of the Dead C.'s 1992 album Harsh 70's Reality: "This could very well be the greatest album of the 90s." This led to discussion of other far-reaching double LPs that might also qualify for that superlative-- Royal Trux's Twin Infinitives,Charalambides' Market Square, Richard Youngs and Simon Wickham-Smith's Lake, and Bardo Pond's Amanita, just to name a few.

Besides being double LPs and coming out in the 90s, those albums have something else in common. The bands made them not to dump out piles of songs, but so they could stretch ideas beyond what one piece of vinyl could handle. Harsh 70's Reality starts with a 23-minute masterpiece called "Driver UFO"; the first tracks on both LPs of Market Square hover around 15 minutes; and Lake offers a single song per side, with three lasting 20 minutes. These bands could've stuck to single LP releases and doled out their longer tracks among numerous albums. But the way they approached music-- as a venue for exploration, a place to take chances and be messy rather than restrained or refined-- made the double album the best medium for their expansive ambitions.

That's true of some of this year's best releases too. On Modern Jester,Aaron Dilloway delves into micro-mutations of noise, and he needs the space of a double album to trace them all. The drones Rachel Evans makes under the name Motion Sickness of Time Travel are always about patience, so it's logical that her best record yet, a self-titled double album, takes 90 minutes to build its sonic structures. Working with extra time pushes Ricardo Dinoso's cycling synths into hallucination territory on Assmiliating the Shadow, out last week on Foxy Digitalis. And it's hard to imagine Swans' profoundly massive The Seer being contained by anything less than a double album. Interestingly, it opens with a masterful 23-minute track-- just like Harsh 70's Reality.

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Albums that last this long, and contain multiple pieces this expansive, make me more aware of time and how it shapes my experience of art. When I listen to a Ramones record, its two-minute songs feel natural-- after all, like most rock fans I grew up on songs that long. But when I listen to "Driver UFO", I can feel time's passage-- sometimes it feels fast, sometimes slow, sometimes both at once. And though I never know exactly how long a track's been playing or how much is left, I often find myself guessing about both. This prodding to think about time is part of what makes these double albums so powerful.

Compared to other media, listening to music seems especially affected by time. For instance, it's just a small part of reading, since you can take as long as you want with a book. The weight of pages in your hands can perhaps make you conscious of how much time you'll need, but even that aspect is being lessened by the unmoored, zoom-able "pages" of e-books. Visual art is even less about time: You can look at a painting for a second, a minute, or a day, but nothing in the work itself requires any of those options.

Movies are closer to music when it comes to time's influence. Even when I've committed to sitting in a theater with no timepiece for reference, I'm often acutely aware of time, and that colors the events on screen. This is explored in depth by Christian Marclay's recent movie The Clock, in which he spliced together hundreds of movie scenes which refer to time points in their plots. The result is a film that spans a day, both literally-- it actually lasts 24 hours-- and figuratively-- screenings of The Clock start at midnight, and if a scene comes on at 3pm, it is also 3pm in the story of the movie from which the scene was extracted. Not only can you tell how long you've been watching Marclay's film and how much is left, you can't really ever ignore those facts.

The Clock is more conceptual than any of the double albums above, none of which are actually about time. But there's another aspect to Marclay's film that also fascinates me about expansive double LPs-- as a viewer or a listener, it's impossible to hold these works all in your memory at once. The Clock is an extreme case, since few will even watch it in one sitting, much less remember it all. But even with Swans' The Seer-- which offers beats, riffs, and verses, the kinds of things easily remembered in pop songs-- it's hard to imagine anyone "knowing" its two hours by heart. Every time you return to it, you've likely forgotten some part of it, and that part could surprise you-- which makes every listen unique. Which means that sometimes the most interesting art is beyond any one person's grasp. In fact, that might be what makes it interesting.

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That's certainly what fascinates me about one of the longest experimental releases of the year, Jazzfinger's Titan Granolith. This UK-based duo have made gritty long-form drones for over a decade, but they've outdone themselves here, filling two cassettes with three hours of coursing sound, including nine pieces that last over ten minutes. In a way, Jazzfinger are the Ramones of lengthy drone-- I expect every song to be long, and stop worrying about duration soon into each piece. But still, I can't avoid thinking about how time is moving, and how these dense pieces change my perception of that motion.

Only 100 copies of Titan Granolith were made, practically guaranteeing that few who don't already know Jazzfinger will ever hear it. But even if it manages to make one new fan think differently about how duration effects the experience of music… well, it's about time. -- Marc Masters